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State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction:

Concepts, Lessons and Strategies

Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause

Practically and conceptually, the ‘state’ is again under siege. Less than twodecades after its ‘rediscovery’ by scholars (Evans et al., 1985; Hall, 1986), thecentral unit of analysis in international relations and comparative politicsseems once again in crisis. Some authors, such as Robert Kaplan, present avision of future chaos resulting from (in a dystopic twist on Marx) thewithering away of the central governments of modern states in favour oftribal domains, ‘city-states, shanty-states, [and] nebulous and anarchicregionalisms’ (Kaplan, 1994: 24). Others welcome the weakening of the statein favour of either a more cosmopolitan (global) or more representative(local) vision of politics (Held, 1995, 1997; Rosenau, 1990, 1997). Still others,often accused of being anachronistic (or even reactionary), argue that in theabsence of global or regional hegemons, the sovereign state remains themost appropriate solution to the problem of political order (Jackson, 2001;Krasner, 1999).

Perhaps it was always so. The modern state, since it emerged out of theashes of the medieval order, has always been a work in progress. Theaspirations of its most ardent defenders for legitimate, representative,redistributive or just governance have shimmered on the horizon distantfrom the reality of contemporary states, whether in their eighteenth centuryabsolutist, or twentieth century authoritarian, versions. But it is against thisbackdrop that the current discourse of ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ states must beunderstood. For every claim that a state has collapsed, is failing, or is goingto fail, contains two usually implicit definitions or benchmarks. Oneconcerns the ‘stateness’ against which any given state should be measured ashaving succeeded or failed (the institutional dimension of state collapse), andthe other concerns the normative and practical implications of such a failure(the functional dimension of state failure). Concern over the possibility ofstate failure thus often has as much to do with dashed expectations about

The authors wish to thank James Bevan, Christophe Bickerton, Marina Ottaway and

Alexandros Yannis for their comments on earlier drafts.

Development and Change 33(5): 753–774 (2002). # Institute of Social Studies 2002. Publishedby Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden,MA 02148. USA

the achievement of modern statehood, or the functions that modern statesshould fulfil, as it does with the empirically-observed decomposition orcollapse of the institutions of governance in different parts of the world.

The articles collected in this volume all work with such benchmarks andassumptions, seeking to reflect critically and synthetically on state failureand state collapse. The main aims of the volume are:

. to develop more precise and nuanced concepts of state failure andcollapse, as situations distinctive in important ways from state decay,political crisis and civil war;

. to examine the different and contrasting paths that have led to statecollapse, and the inter-relationships between the national and trans-national economic, political and social forces that are making instancesof state collapse relatively more frequent in the contemporary era;

. to analyse the intervention strategies that the international communityhas adopted to respond to situations of state collapse, including con-sidering how the efforts of external intervenors are constrained andthwarted, and how their activities may have unintended (or dysfunc-tional) consequences.

This introduction provides some overall context for the contributions, andhighlights some key conceptual and political issues concerning the presentand future of the contemporary state. It does so first by sketching some ofthe issues behind the modern process of state formation, and the differentunderstandings of the roles and functions of the modern state that haveemerged. Along the way, it develops further the two-fold concept of statecollapse and failure (institutional and functional) to support a critical exam-ination of the phenomenon of (and literature on) state collapse. Finally,it situates and briefly overviews individual papers in light of the differentperspectives on state failure and collapse that have been developed.

It is important, however, to issue a caveat at the outset. This volume, andin particular this introduction, does not uncritically assume that there is anever-widening crisis of state collapse in which new forces and contradictions(such as globalization and the decline of interest in propping up corrupt andoften violent regimes) are causing increasing numbers of states to fail andsome even to collapse. Although its incidence seems to be increasing, thescope of the phenomenon of state collapse depends in large part on how onedefines it. Full-blown cases of state collapse, which involve the extremedisintegration of public authority and the metamorphosis of societies into abattlefield of all against all, remain relatively rare; in recent years only statessuch as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Congo/Zaire and perhaps Albaniaseem to fit this definition. But if state collapse remains a rare phenomenonand state maintenance (in weakened or decayed capacity) remains the norm,it is nevertheless true that many more states are today failing to providesecurity and public order, legitimate representation, and wealth or welfareto their citizens. Places such as the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Haiti,

754 Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause

Colombia and Afghanistan have all witnessed the near-total collapse ofcentral authority over part or all of their territory, with the resultingdisorder often causing great human suffering.

Certainly since discussion of the phenomenon of state failure seems toexceed the importance of the full-blown cases of state collapse, the linkedconcepts of state failure and collapse must resonate with a broader and moreprevalent crisis in the capacities and legitimacy of modern states, or they mustserve, like the canary in the mineshaft, as warning signals of a phenomenonthat, it is believed, will engulf a wider swath of the world’s peoples in yearsto come. Either way, the evidence needs to be interrogated, and set in somesort of dynamic historical context.

THE POLITICS OF THE MODERN STATE

The story of the emergence of the modern state can be told in several ways,historically and conceptually. In historical terms, its emergence is commonly(if simplistically) dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emblem-atic in this narrative is the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which codifiedsolutions to the problems of political order revealed in the Thirty YearsWar. The Westphalia treaties were but one of the early instances in which aconcept of the modern state — as a sovereign territorially-based entity —was deployed by secular rulers to assert their control over their lands andpopulations. They arbitrated matters of faith and finances in the face ofresidual, but ineffectual, claims for a hierarchical authority structure centredon the church and its affiliated rulers (Osiander, 2001).

Of course, sovereignty so defined was in part a legal fiction that cor-responded in only a loose way to political realities. Only states that wererecognized as sovereign by other sovereign states possessed sovereign rights,and the legal claim of sovereignty had to be asserted in practice — rulers hadto gain and keep de facto control. Several states, such as France, had beendoing this long before Westphalia, and the main ‘non-state’ (the HolyRoman Empire) remained politically salient (in peace negotiations) until itsdissolution in 1806. Even the most successful early state-claimants reallypossessed very little control over their territories. What Mann (1993) callsthe ‘intensification’ of state power, and others call ‘state centralization’, wasa long time coming, and state borders were not impermeable nor werepopulations closed off to outside influences. From the outset, the modernstate thus represented an ideal of sovereign territoriality to which rulersaspired, but which they seldom achieved. Even Western European statestoday do not always reach the Weberian pinnacle in which a rationalizedcentral bureaucracy enjoys a monopoly of organized violence over a giventerritory and population.

Conceptually, the triumph of the state as the solution to the problem ofpolitical order can be told in at least three different, albeit inter-connected,

State Failure, Collapse, and Reconstruction 755

ways. Following Charles Tilly’s metaphor of ‘war-making and state-makingas organized crime’, it can be seen as a more-or-less inadvertent process bywhich state elites, seeking to consolidate their hold on power, acted as theequivalent of protection rackets, offering (often minimal) security in returnfor extraction, thus unleashing a long process that contributed to thedevelopment of the modern state (Tilly, 1985, 1990). Following the liberaltradition of political thought, it can be seen as a process of ‘social con-tracting’, either between rulers and subjects or among subjects themselves,by which individuals surrendered their unlimited freedoms (and unlimitedinsecurities) to live within a civil order that guaranteed security and whichenjoyed therefore a certain political legitimacy. Following a politicaleconomy tradition, the emergence of the modern state can be understoodas an efficient mechanism for ensuring property rights and securing marketsthat allowed capitalism (and imperialism) to flourish. Later struggles forredistribution and welfare were also inscribed in this narrative.

Whatever the preferred account, it is clear that the process of modernstate formation proceeded in an enormously complex fashion over roughlyfive centuries. Along the way there also developed an elaborate discourse ofstatehood in which the modern (sovereign territorial) state acquired a seriesof other attributes (Del Rosso, 1995). But the three core functions oractivities represented by the three intertwined narratives of the state —providing security, representation and welfare — provide a convenient wayto summarize the functions a state is to supposed to perform. In the moststraightforward sense, failure to perform these functions is a failure of thestate. This opens the way to our broader conceptualization that goes beyondinstitutional collapse to encompass functional failure in some of its extremeforms.

War, Order and (In)security

Behind Tilly’s formulation that states make war, and ‘war makes states’(Tilly, 1985: 170) lies a process by which (in theory, at least) the institutionsand instruments of modern violence are subordinated to political authorities.Tilly and others working in this vein (Ayoob, 1995; Downing, 1992; Raslerand Thompson, 1989) do not present a mechanistic, universal process, but acomplex constellation of factors (extraction, protection, war-making, state-building) that produce at different times and places different sorts of govern-ance structures. State forms can range from representative to authoritarianor even predatory, but in even the most repressive the state does not fail toemerge. The assumption underlying these arguments is that institutions oforganized violence have always (or nearly always) ultimately been made toserve political interests, and hence to run in tandem with the state-makingprocess, rather than undermining it. There are, however, two importantobservations that need to be made about this assumption.


First, a tension exists between the institutional and functional under-standings of state failure: state institutions can persist even while the statefails to fulfil what we understand as its key attributes. As pointed out byChristopher Clapham, although Rwanda has frequently been called acollapsed state by policy-makers and journalists, the genocidal war thattook place in that country in 1994 was not enabled or produced by theRwandan state disintegrating. Instead, the genocide was produced by‘highly disciplined agents of the state [who] pursued the task of murderingmany of its people with hideous efficiency’ (Clapham, this volume).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, scholars are now beginning torecognize the role that war-making (in the sense of the role of institutions oforganized violence in state formation, rather than actual fighting of wars)can play in the process of state collapse. Briefly, there are three centralissues:

. what happens when the interests of a narrowly-based or illegitimategovernment are fused to instruments of organized violence in theabsence of other institutional counterweights?

. what are the forces leading to an erosion or reinforcement of the state’smonopoly on the legitimate use of violence?

. what are the tradeoffs between ensuring order and security throughinstitutions of organized violence and fulfilling the other two mainfunctions of the modern state (representation and welfare)?

In practical terms, this leads to a focus on the role of armed forces (military,paramilitary and other) in society; the process of ‘military development’(acquisition of modern arms and institutional forms) and the pathologiesof violence and repression that can emerge through state violence (such asin Iraq) (Krause, 1996; Reno, 1998); the role of force in rentier economiesand that of actors with access to ‘conflict goods’ (Cooper, and Cramer andGoodhand, this volume; Keen, 1998); or the erosion of the state’s monopolyof the legitimate use of violence through the widespread availability of modernweapons (Musah, this volume).

Representation and Legitimacy

The notion that the state has to represent the symbolic identity of statesubjects is a relatively new one, dating perhaps from the eighteenth or earlynineteenth century. Not surprisingly, there is little consensus over exactlywhat makes a state legitimate or representative in concrete terms. Leavingaside the observation that de facto ‘the history of the modern state is in nosmall part a history of rulers who are illegitimate’, the modern notion ofstatehood has entailed a series of different attempts to resolve the questionof how states and regimes could be made legitimate in the eyes of the people


(Jackson, 1990: 22). Nationalism and democracy (accompanied by rule oflaw and respect for human rights) are often proposed as the two mostimportant means by which these functions are realized.

In the longer perspective, social contract philosophies and doctrines liebehind the ideas of both democracy and nationalism. Theorists such asHobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, without any hint of modern conceptions ofdemocracy or nationalism, presented different forms of a social contract asseventeenth or eighteenth century solutions to the problem of why sovereignsshould be obeyed when their rule was no longer ordained by Church andEmperor. Ultimately, the people grant the state the right to rule over themin return for the state providing security from civil disorder and war. Themore radical, or liberal, extensions of social contract thinking characteristicof the Age of Revolutions developed a language of the nation in terms of abody of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them as a state,giving them the right of popular self-determination (Mayall, 1990: 38–42).The stage was then set for the fusion of ideas of nationalism and democracyto the idea of the state, which in the nineteenth century became tightly linkedwith the socio-economic changes catalysed by the industrial revolution.

For many scholars, nationalism as the embodiment of the idea of the statewas thus a nineteenth century attempt to bind people as citizens to theirindustrializing post-revolutionary European states through giving thepopulation a ‘civic religion’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 85; see also Gellner, 1983):the nation-state.1 For others (Posen, 1993), nationalism was an essential(and instrumentalized) means of mobilization to meet the needs of modernwarfare. Either way, most West European states emerging from the con-flagrations of World Wars I and II, and the social struggles of the inter-warperiod, came to contract for their legitimacy through an extensive franchisethat was linked (through such things as citizenship laws) to the language andpractice of nationalism and the nation-state. The normalization of thenation-state as an institutional and political ideal was complete, as was theidea that nationalism could be mastered (to avoid pathological forms) andchannelled by state elites in an instrumental top-down process to meet theneeds of the modern state.

The intertwined development of democracy and nationalism in the Westthrough the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should not obscure someproblematic aspects of their relationship that are important for the issue ofstate failure and state collapse. While the idea of democracy has emerged inthe twenty-first century as largely uncontested (if not universally accepted),one must recognize that a wide variety of institutional forms of representative

1. There is of course the contrary view that sees nationalism as a deeper historico-cultural

phenomenon that can even take on religious or mystical overtones (Anderson, 1991;

Smith, 1994). Without entering into this debate, we take the view that the attributes of

modern nationalism that are relevant to the issue of state failure/collapse are derived from

its more recent (primarily nineteenth century) manifestations and sources.


rule have emerged (consociational, republican, federalist, parliamentary,corporatist, etc.) to accommodate the different constellations of sub-nationalcommunities within states. Moreover, in a number of Western states theconsolidation of democracy into a stable institutional form was unresolveduntil the last part of the twentieth century, or is still unsettled today (forexample, Northern Ireland, Corsica, Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia). Similarly,despite the wide support enjoyed by the idea of self-determination of peoplesas a foundation for state legitimacy, the twentieth century history ofnationalism contains many examples that call into question its appropriate-ness as a foundation for state building. Certainly nationalist excesses havebeen widely regarded as a key element in the causes of World War II (and ina different way, World War I). Finally, there remains an underlying andpersistent tension between democracy and nationalism, since the possibilityof a ‘tyranny of the majority’ can only be excluded in communities whereindividuals possess a complex matrix of cross-cutting interests that present amyriad of opportunities for majority coalitions, thus muting the importanceof nationalism as a societal glue. The only other alternative — homogeneouscommunities with no plurality of nations struggling within (only a pluralityof interests not linked to questions of political identity) — is more hypo-thetical than real in most parts of the world.

The result is the existence of several dilemmas or paradoxes that aredirectly relevant to the process of state-formation and state collapse in thepost-colonial world:

. is a top-down and instrumental concept of nationalism (essentiallystate-led) an appropriate model for the relationship between state andnation, and for successful state- and nation-building projects (Schuur-man, 2000)?

. what kind of nationalism emerges in the absence of the materialconditions out of which the Western concept evolved (in particular, inpre-industrial societies with no contractarian tradition of state–societyrelations), and is it state-weakening or state-strengthening?

. which of the different institutional expressions of representative ruleare compatible (or incompatible) with which visions of contemporarynationalism (exclusionist, hyphenated, contractual, organic)?

These questions highlight that the relationships between state and nation,and between national identity and representative rule, are dynamic productsof political struggle, which have rarely been imposed successfully from theoutside (or from above). Given our concern with cases of state failure andcollapse, attention to the representative functions of the state leads to afocus on failures of nation-building and their implications for potential statecollapse (in places such as Nigeria, Afghanistan or Sudan, for example). Italso invites consideration of the impact of communal conflicts over recog-nition and representation (such as of the Albanians in Macedonia, or theAbkhaz in Georgia), and the relationship between conflicts cast in the


language of self-determination and state collapse. The normative implicationsof these questions, especially of the last one (perhaps a collapsed state is agood thing if ‘more perfect’ political communities emerge from the debris),are inescapable.

Wealth and Welfare

A third optic on the modern state sees its emergence as tightly tied to thedevelopment of modern capitalism (Giddens, 1987: 122–71), and as aninstitutional form particularly well suited to it. It is impossible to trace thelinks between economics and the state in any easy way, but two historicalthemes are particularly relevant for our concern with state failure andcollapse: the need for a stable politico-legal framework to foster economicgrowth and development, and the rise of the welfare and entitlement stateas a powerful glue that binds citizens to their state. With respect to the firsttheme, in the early modern period, capitalism was able to take root andflourish in Europe within a particular normative and institutional matrix inwhich political and coercive power in Western Europe was sufficientlydecentralized to permit the expansion of market relations without nascentstate elites being able to overwhelm merchants through tight state control(exit often being an easy option). Simultaneously, the emergence of a pan-European merchant class was facilitated by the vestiges of the Roman andmedieval orders, in which merchants understood themselves (as did othersocial classes) to share a common set of legal and cultural norms thatfacilitated such things as the development of stable property rights, trade,enforcement of contracts, and so forth (Hall, 1986). It is difficult to over-estimate how closely linked the political and economic spheres were: asGiddens points out (1987: 150), a rational, law-governed economic sphere‘derives from the very same sources as the sphere of sovereignty so elementalto the nature of the modern state’.

The development of the welfare function of the modern state is a muchmore recent phenomenon. The nineteenth century rise of the welfare statecan be seen as intertwined with the emergence of modern nationalism andthe extension of the basis of state legitimacy to include a concern for theeconomic well-being of the citizens and for the overall management of thenational economy. State elites have long been concerned with the wealth ofthe state, as early mercantilist doctrines highlight, but the extension of thisconcern to the welfare of citizens begins only with the foundation of themodern welfare state in Bismarck’s Germany (health, education, evenpensions), and the subsequent consolidation and generalization of thesegains throughout Western Europe and (to a different extent) North America.One result is that notions of citizenship and membership in the nationalcommunity are now more closely linked to welfare entitlements (in thebroadest sense), to the extent that such things as large-scale migration (or


even small-scale migration, in some cases) is perceived as a threat where itcoincides with the restructuring and retrenchment of Western welfare states(Heisler and Layton-Henry, 1993).2

These two themes are directly relevant for the contemporary discussion ofstate failure and collapse. To begin with, the first dimension on which thestate can fail relative to the economy would be its inability to provide astable politico-legal framework in which human, social and economiccapital can be accumulated and invested. Uncertain rules of the game (or norules at all) act as a powerful disincentive to all but short-term high-returneconomic activity (often associated with extractive industries), or to enclaveeconomic development (such as export zones) with few backward andforward linkages to the local economy. As pointed out by Boyce andDuffield (both in this volume), this function of the state is one of the mostdifficult to restore (or create) in a post-collapse or post-conflict context, andit often comes only as part of a more comprehensive reshaping of state–society relations. Here the pertinent questions are: what are the minimalconditions of governance required to foster a climate conducive to the invest-ment of human, social and economic capital; and what are the roles andinfluence of the international community and international institutions increating these conditions? Recent work by the World Bank (Colletta et al.,1998; World Bank, 1998) demonstrates that these questions are on themultilateral agenda, but coherent answers are some distance away.

Second, the welfare functions assumed by post-colonial states differed incritical ways from the industrial welfare state model, which was based looselyon a redistributive mechanism and (relatively) efficient taxation system.Post-colonial welfare functions often assume the form of price subsidies oncore commodities (bread, cooking oil, and so on) or other indirect subsidies,and they are often paid for by external or internal rents (such as commodityexports, international loans and foreign aid). The ability of most of theworld’s poorer states to sponsor effective redistributive or allocative socialdevelopment policies is extremely limited — as is highlighted, for example,by publications such as the UN’s Human Development Reports (Clapham,this volume; Vivian, 1994). More significantly, the welfare structures thatare in place often play a central rule in regime legitimation and maintenancestrategies, through neo-patrimonial distributive structures that are not efficientin an economic sense, and that can therefore increase societal fissures orexacerbate inter-group conflicts (see, for example, Cramer and Goodhand,this volume). Under circumstances of economic globalization (understoodas a set of economic transformations that increase the relative power of mobilefactors of production — capital or, to a lesser extent, labour — and whose

2. This is so despite the fact that immigrant communities tend on the whole to contribute

more to social welfare systems than they receive, and also tend to alleviate the demo-

graphic crunch associated with an ageing population.


benefits are distributed in widely unequal fashion across a population) inwhich even the welfare functions of advanced industrial states have increas-ingly come under stress (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Pierson, 1996), the welfarefunctions of lesser-developed states are even less likely to be able to providefor the basic needs of their populations.

Situating Post-Colonial State Failure and Collapse

As this overview suggests, challenges to and reworking of the modern state’sinstitutional and functional expressions have been ongoing throughout thepast few centuries. Attempts to pin down the essential nature of the state(the ideal criteria and functions assigned to it) end up reifying or idealizingit, stripping what is after all a human (social and political) construct of itshistoricity. Even when the state is regarded as an ongoing political process,there has been little question about the desirability of continuing the state-building project. In the long-term search for solutions to problems of politicalorder the state has been reformed and remade, but since the end of empire asa political form, it has been the state — and not some other form of politicalorganization — that has been promoted as the answer to addressing socialand economic upheaval, conflict and war.3 The aspiration to viable statehoodthus rests on a deeply ingrained assumption about appropriate forms ofpolitical organization and order.

This has important implications for how we understand state collapse andfailure, especially in the post-colonial world, since in these parts of the worldthe narrative of the developmental state has been crucial to the discussion ofstate failure and collapse. Here scholars and policy-makers have adoptedand sustained a vision of the role of the state in the post-colonial world thatcombined all three of the above narratives of security, representation andwelfare. In retrospect, the vision that new states were to build legitimatenations, provide wealth, and guarantee security within the span of a fewdecades of achieving formal independence was, to be kind, somewhat naive.One can only expect such success if the idea of the state is taken completelyout of its historical context, and regarded as an institutional form that oweslittle or nothing to the historical forces that created it. One (somewhatironic) way to think about the contemporary anguish over state collapse isto note that what has collapsed is more the vision (or dream) of theprogressive, developmental state that sustained generations of academics,activists and policy-makers, than any real existing state.

3. Strictly speaking, a global system of states dates only from the final breakup of the

Portuguese empire in the 1970s, or even from the 1990s if the former Soviet Union is

viewed as the last European empire to undergo decolonization. But the idea of empire died

some time before that, probably in the aftermath of World War I.


Perhaps this is a bit harsh. There is little doubt, however, that thetwentieth century decolonization process illustrates just how ingrainedstatehood had become in the modern imagination. The forces that gave riseto the post-1945 wave of decolonization included the growing effectivenessof colonial resistance movements, super-power pressures for an end toformal empires, and the exhaustion of the colonial powers themselves. Butpart of why decolonization arose with such force was a ‘widespread changeof mind and mood [in and after World War II] about the . . . legitimacy ofcolonialism’ (Jackson, 1987: 526; see also Jackson, 1990; Crawford, 1993).This movement against colonialism extended liberal concepts of self-determination to the colonial possessions of the European empires, makingindependent statehood for colonies into a new international norm andeventually, international legal principle.

In other words, statehood was rendered as the only possible mode ofgovernance for the world — and this despite the ‘pseudo-statehood’ of manyof the candidate states. Many of the states that were created in thedecolonization process did not qualify for statehood by the criterion ofinternational law in use by the 1930s, namely ‘the existence of effectivegovernment, with centralized administrative and legislative organs’ (Brownlie,1979: 74). Yet they nonetheless were granted independence and theirgovernments, however quickly they left behind founding constitutions andtook on authoritarian and dictatorial powers, were treated by other govern-ments as bona fide representatives of national communities. This ‘pseudo-statehood’ was in some cases converted into ‘real’ statehood, especially inAsia. But in many other instances, especially in Africa, post-colonial statebuilding resulted in the formation of what Robert Jackson (1987: 526) hascalled ‘quasi-states’:

The state in Africa is . . . more a personal- or primordial-favouring political arrangement

than a public-regarding realm. Government is less an agency to provide political goods such

as law, order, security, justice, or welfare and more a fountain of privilege, wealth and power

for a small elite who control it . . . Many governments are incapable of enforcing their writ

throughout their territory. In more than a few countries. . . some regions have escaped from

national control . . . [and the states] are fairly loose patchworks of plural allegiances and

identities somewhat reminiscent of medieval Europe. (Jackson, 1987: 527–8)

One could extend Jackson’s logic to conclude that such pseudo- or quasi-states were never really states, and thus that the puzzle is not how and whythey may fail, but how and why they exist or persist at all.

The assumption that statehood is an appropriate institutional form, evenin environments which would seem hardly propitious for its flourishing, hascome to be partly questioned, especially by Africanists writing about ‘thecrisis of the African state’ (Young, 1988: 25; see also Hyden, 1999). Theiranalyses are part of a broader trend in development studies that, instead oftaking states for granted, now treats them as a major impediment to develop-ment — as political systems that have failed to live up to the expectations thatpeople had of them after independence, and that must be overhauled in order


for development to succeed.4 But even this critique still presupposes thatmodern statehood (albeit reformed) is the only form of political organizationthat makes any sense for the post-colonial world (Ayoob, 1995). In some ofthe treatments of ‘overhauling the state’ there also remains an expectation thatit will not be so difficult to change the institutions and political structures ofeither quasi-states, or the new pseudo-states created by the dissolution of theSoviet Union. The 1990s literature on a ‘third wave’ of global democratization,‘a democratic Zeitgeist [that] swept the globe’, is a good illustration of thistendency (Diamond, 1997: xiii; see also Huntington, 1991).

It is now somewhat easier to understand how and why the topic of statefailure has received high-profile attention in recent years from both thescholarly and policy-making communities. Beyond the limited prospect ofstate collapse, lie the dashed hopes of development apparent in manyregions of the world, and beyond this lies the broader crisis of the modernstate system. Understood as a systemic prospect, state failure is causally linkedto increased and widespread humanitarian suffering, regional instability,and transnational threats of international organized crime and terrorism. Itis thus not just treated as the local population’s Hobbesian nightmare, butalso as a potential source of insecurities for the core states of internationalsociety, and as a phenomenon that threatens to undermine the modernproject of achieving political order.

Given this analysis, one might expect that the extreme case of statecollapse would be a prominent object of study for those working on statefailure, and/or that scholarship on state failure would deploy a coherent setof concepts and distinctions with which to study the processes of statefailure and the extreme cases of state collapse. But with some notableexceptions, such as Zartman’s (1995) landmark edited volume, this is not thecase. In the most prominent literature, instances of state collapse have beentreated either simply as additional cases of political crisis or civil war incountries (Esty et al., 1998), or as the extreme end of a continuum of theweakening of state governing capacity that it would be unhelpful to analyseseparately (for example, Dorff, 2000). The large-scale State Failure TaskForce project, led by Ted Robert Gurr (Esty et al., 1998), treats state failureand collapse merely as ‘new labels’, and does not distinguish state failure(that is, functional failure) from the much larger category of political crisesand wars.5

4. The best analyses of statist assumptions in development come from critical development

studies such as Ferguson (1990); these do not share the ‘overhauling the state’ approach

found in the broader literature, which includes numerous World Bank publications as well

as the contributions of development scholars such as Sørenson (1993, 1998).

5. The State Failure Task Force (at http://www.bsos.umd.edu/cidcm/stfail/index.htm) represents

a particularly egregious case of data and method-driven research, which attempts to

assimilate the phenomenon of state collapse within existing categories of analysis, and

outside any political or historical context.


This failure to distinguish conceptually the phenomena of state failureand collapse blurs the different processes that lead to functional failure or toinstitutional collapse, and obscures the relative rarity of full-blown statecollapse. State maintenance (in whatever weakened or decayed capacity) isstill the norm, and state collapse the exception. This is true for Africa, despiteits being home to the majority of collapsed states of the contemporary era(see Musah, this volume). It is also true if one chooses as a reference groupthe roughly forty states that have gone (or are going) through civil warssince the end of the Cold War. In only about a third of these is it appropriateto say that the conflict was based in and/or helped lead to a situation of statecollapse.

By contrast, there has been more study of state collapse as a distinct-ive phenomenon undertaken by practitioners (governmental and non-governmental). However, this policy-oriented literature has mostly focusedon post-collapse intervention strategies, or on specific economic, politicalor security aspects of state collapse. Concern about the prospect of statecollapse has therefore not been matched by attempts to understand theconditions of its emergence (state collapse out of state failure) in a focusedand sustained way. This inevitably has consequences for the quality ofpolicy analysis, since a good understanding of processes of collapse is crucialto determine, for example, how the political reconstruction of collapsedstates might best be approached.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS VOLUME

If state collapse as conceptualized above is uncommon, even in the con-temporary context, what justifies a special issue of Development and Changedevoted to its study? There are essentially three factors. First — and closestto immediate policy analysis aims — collapsed states present distinctivechallenges to external agencies and organizations that might intervene incivil wars or (as is also increasingly the case) propose to structure and guidepost-conflict reconstruction efforts. In order for the goals of external inter-ventions to have any hope of being achieved, this distinctiveness needs to bedrawn out and made part of the analytical basis for aid efforts.

The example of humanitarian relief work can make this more concrete.Humanitarian relief in its traditional expression was predicated on theexistence of states, on conflicts taking place between state armies, and onsome level of residual political accountability existing between the warringparties and the societies they claimed to represent or defend. In recent yearshumanitarian relief agencies have become more experienced in working incivil war and famine ‘complex humanitarian emergencies’, but this work hastypically depended on agency–state agreements (such as the negotiatedaccess of Operation Lifeline to relief sites and camps in the Sudan) and thuson the continued existence of the state. In situations of state collapse,


however, there is effectively no state with whom to make these agreementsor to regulate, prioritize or direct aid flows. There is also limited (if any)accountability between warring parties and local populations, which putsthe security of both vulnerable populations and aid workers at far greaterrisk than in the past (Muggah and Berman, 2001). Gaining a better under-standing of situations of state collapse would help humanitarian agencies,many of whom have recognized the difficulties of working in collapsedstates, to develop better strategies to meet these challenges.

Second, compared to the Cold War era, instances of state collapse may bebecoming relatively more common. This makes it plausible to move beyondparticularist explanations of state collapse (collapse as a condition caused byevents and circumstances unique to a state’s history). Although explanationsof state collapse will always entail context-specific factors, scholars may nowbe able to discern recurrent patterns in processes of state collapse andacquire a better understanding of what makes some states more vulnerablethan others to the dynamics leading to state collapse. This kind of study isalso important in that it can lead to identification of new (or at leasthistorically more pronounced) dynamics with relevance for future develop-ments in fragile states. One example is the trade in conflict goods, which isshown by the study of collapsed states to have been a central aspect in statedisintegration in places such as Congo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. There isalso the potential in other states (for example, Nigeria) for war over thecontrol of strategic resources, ‘involving rebel groups and privatized armies,making state institutions irrelevant’ (Doornbos, this volume).

Third, taking up the issue of state collapse has merit in that it forces us toreconsider some of our least-examined assumptions about states and thestate system. Once state collapse is seen, not as an ‘abnormal’ event, but asone possible outcome of the ongoing process of state formation (and decay),we can enter into a dialogue with other scholars who examine the historicalevolution of the Westphalian system. Most of this work attempts to re-historicize the contemporary state system to break out of the static visioninherited from a realist perspective on international relations (Keohane,1986; Mearsheimer, 1994/95), and to present a more dynamic or evolution-ary vision of states and sovereignty. Few of these scholars, however, seem toconsider state collapse as a plausible, even perhaps likely, outcome for somestates in the system. They likewise seldom examine the possibility that theforces that produce strong and legitimate states in some contexts can,interacting with different local and historical conditions, generate weak andcollapsed states in others. An engagement with the phenomenon of statecollapse thus raises important issues for the future of world politics and ourunderstanding of states and sovereignty.

Taking these arguments as its cue, the first section of the volume, titledStates, Statebuilding and State Collapse, tackles three broadly conceptualissues. Christopher Clapham’s contribution on the challenges to statehoodin a globalized world highlights the distinctive trajectory of post-colonial


state formation, and explains how a post-World War II world order thathelped to maintain post-colonial states has given way to a much lessconducive context. In light of this, Clapham argues that vulnerable statesare liable to get caught in a vicious circle of decay, with the most vulnerablebecoming quasi-permanent conflict zones. Thus, statehood is not a given forsome parts of the international system.

Parallel to this, Martin Doornbos grapples with the conceptual fuzzinessassociated with the concept of state collapse. He develops a focus on thelinkages (and match or mismatch) between state and society in manyconflict-riven states in order to better understand processes and dynamics ofstate collapse. An important point he makes is that state collapse does notmean that societies and territories lack all semblance of order, or that all ofthe functions of a modern state go unfulfilled. In fact, within (and between)societies there often exists a variety of local governance structures andtraditional authorities that do not depend exclusively (or mainly) on statestructures. In some situations of state collapse, these networks (such as theclan-based structures in parts of Somalia) may continue to provide com-munities with a means of conducting their lives and ordering their affairs. Asa result, state and society often are evolving along different trajectories ofmodernity, with increasing disjunctures between their different constituentunits.

To close this section, Alexandros Yannis examines the internationalcommunity’s growing interest and concern with state collapse. For Yannis,international discourse on state collapse dates from the end of the ColdWar, and draws on emergent fears about globalization and its implicationsfor state authority, as well as (often-related) regional and internationalsecurity threats now identified as being linked to domestic breakdown.Equally important has been the ‘turn to human rights’ in post-Cold Warinternational society. Yannis points out that international institutions forensuring or providing international peace and security are predicated on theinternal stability of member states of the international system. Contempor-ary institutions are poorly adapted to addressing state collapse, however,and will have to be changed extensively if the normative agenda now currentis to be realized.

The second part of the volume presents Anatomies of Failure and Collapse,including both country-specific case studies and broader analyses of con-tributing factors. Leading off the country-specific studies, William Renofocuses on Nigeria as a case of a failed state that he argues has considerablepotential for collapse. Reno traces this potential to governmental rule thathas been and continues to be hostile to state institutions and public order.Beyond (deliberately) creating functional state failure, governmental misrulelimits or prevents mass movements for systematic change from gainingground and instead lays the basis for interest-based, narrow, and ultimatelyanti-social change movements. State failure is thus made self-perpetuating,in that even opposition to the state is hostile to public order.


This account, with its emphasis on a socio-economic calculus underlyingconflicts in failed states, is complemented in the study of Afghanistan byChristopher Cramer and Jonathon Goodhand. Afghanistan’s history ofstate formation is marked by efforts by Afghan state rulers to build amodern nation state, only to have these efforts interrupted and reversed byviolent resistance. At the heart of this troubled career, according to Cramerand Goodhand, has been the inability of state-builders to develop in asustained way a monopoly of violence, and the path of rentier statehoodpursued practically throughout the twentieth century to attempt tomodernize the state despite tribal forces that could not be defeated orsidelined by trumping claims to authority (national or religious). Currentreconstruction efforts do not sufficiently address this history, including theimperative for a strong central state that it reveals, and what it teaches as tothe legitimacy of radical Islam and fragmentary regionalism cum warlord-ism. Nor do these efforts sufficiently recognize the regional dimensions ofthe Afghan conflict, crucial to Afghanistan’s collapse in the 1980s, andneeding attention today if Afghan state-building is not to fail yet again.

The political and ideological elements in Cramer and Goodhand’s studyare taken further in Spyros Demetriou’s examination of Georgia. Georgiarepresents a case in which the processes of state formation and collapse areintertwined. The legacy of Soviet nationalities policy (an ‘external’ influencein a certain sense) meant that crucial fracture lines existed betweenGeorgian, Abkhaz and Ossetian populations. Demetriou argues that thesefracture lines could have been overcome, but that instead they were seizedby post-Soviet politicians intent on gaining leverage on political powerthrough violent means. From the outset (1990) armed violence was a meansof gaining influence, and ‘private’ armies were increasingly used to terrorizedifferent communal groups (to force migration and perpetuate ethnic cleans-ing), to consolidate a hold on the war economy, and to support clientalisticnetworks. In spite of some capable leadership by Eduard Shevardnadze, theeconomic weakness of the state and endemic corruption has so far thwartedefforts to strike the kinds of bargains necessary to move beyond this cycle ofdisintegration–reconstitution.

All of the case studies in the volume refer to international and globaldimensions of state collapse. Broader analyses in this vein are provided byAbdel-Fatau Musah and Neil Cooper. Surveying Africa, Musah makes thecrucial point that the state — not warlords or groups within the state — isfrequently the primary source of violence. State collapse is often presaged bywidespread violence and predation by the state against its own citizens, asthe core function of providing security erodes. This violence is facilitated bythe activities of foreign private military actors (loosely, albeit somewhatinaccurately, described as ‘mercenaries’), and the easy availability of smallarms and light weapons. If less directly, regional and Western governmentsmay also contribute through engaging in the arms trade, participating inresource exploitation in collapsed and collapsing states, and using alliance


diplomacy to protect economic interests and to contain unfriendly regimes.So may international financial agencies, through the cover that structuraladjustment has given to corrupt elites to further privatize the state. Parallelto this, Cooper focuses on the importance of conflict trade — ‘trade ingoods that directly supports the war efforts of actors in conflict’ (Cooper,this volume). Diamonds, timber, drugs, rare minerals, and other such goodsoften become, in places such as Colombia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, orAngola, the objects of conflict, control over which guarantees actors theability to continue fighting. But as Cooper points out, these goods possesslittle value outside of a global market that perpetuates the subordinateposition of certain states.

Section three turns to Relief and Reconstruction, with contributions thattreat the immediate problems of humanitarian relief and peace-building infailed and collapsed states (Daniel Chong and James Boyce) and the longer-term issues related to institutional reconstruction (Jarat Chopra, MarinaOttaway and Mark Duffield). Chong adopts a political economy perspectiveto consider some of the major dilemmas created for humanitarian reliefagencies by predatory, war-based parallel economies. These include dilemmasof military protection — for example, military accompaniment may benecessary to reach vulnerable populations, but it can inject money andsupplies into a conflict and thereby exacerbate and lengthen it. Based ona comparison of two different international aid interventions in Cambodiain 1979–82 and the early 1990s, Chong examines contrasting policies toaddress the dilemmas he identifies. One of his main findings is that unlessthere is active commitment at all levels of the international system, reliefagencies really have few options available to manage the potential negativeeffects of their assistance.

Chong’s conclusion is echoed in Boyce’s study of the peace-buildingpotential of foreign aid. For Boyce, foreign aid has potential importance (inprinciple) as a peace-building tool for the international community.However, there are a number of limitations in practice. Concentrating onthe Bosnian case, Boyce notes that aid and assistance can be used (orchannelled) in ways that exacerbate rather than resolve conflicts, especiallywhere deep social cleavages are involved. The usefulness of even the best-designed aid conditionalities is likewise limited where there are no (or weak)state authorities with whom to deal. Conflicts and tensions betweendifferent donor priorities (geopolitical and/or commercial versus theinterests of peace-building) also mean that the ‘best designed’ aid packagesand conditionalities are seldom realized in practice. Finally, there areimperatives internal to international financial and donor institutions (suchas the need to ‘get the money out the door’) that run counter to imposingand sticking to strong conditionalities. If the billions of dollars spent onpost-conflict peace-building are to be more effective, donors must acknowl-edge both the political nature and impact of aid, and the ‘politics’ of aidconditionality.


For the original designers of the UN Transitional Administration, EastTimor was to be an innovative project in state-building. Underlying sourcesof conflict were to be fundamentally transformed under the UN governor-ship, and a multi-party democracy was to be established that drew on andencouraged popular participation. Jarat Chopra’s study of East Timor laysout the plans to achieve these goals, including decentralization of the UN’spolitical authority (that of a formal government in East Timor) and thecreation of popular representation in the form of consultative councils. Hethen analyses how these plans were thwarted by individuals and groups inthe Transitional Administration, with the result that the East Timoresegovernment appears on a path to one-party rule, with the newly-createdarmed forces already politicized.

Chopra’s study shows that the organizational culture and interests ofexternal intervenors can contribute to serious failings in institutional recon-struction. Most notably, ‘peace-maintenance’ doctrine, even at its mostinnovative, presupposes a political vacuum in ‘governmentless’ places andthus obscures local political dynamics. This issue is taken further inOttaway’s examination of the international community’s efforts atdemocracy promotion in failed and collapsed states. Ottaway observes thatthe ethos underpinning democracy promotion is to use external assistance asa ‘short-cut’ to the Weberian state, rather than relying on internal processesof state formation. The chances of this approach succeeding depend heavilyon the distribution of power in the country — something not yet sufficientlyrecognized by Western donors. Ironically, donors have also developed ablueprint for reconstruction that is becoming more and more complex, tothe point of absurdity when seen against the backdrop of the actual humanand institutional capacities of states such as Sierra Leone, Cambodia orMozambique. Ottaway’s conclusion is that although it may be relativelyeasy to create institutional structures, the transformation of these structuresinto legitimate institutions is extremely difficult, and only marginallyaffected by external actors. Unlike much conventional ‘critical’ scholarshipon democracy promotion and external intervention, Ottaway does notdismiss entirely the utility of such projects, but concludes that ‘bargain-basement imperialism’ — ‘rebuild[ing] a collapsed state according to afavourable model but with minimal resources’ (Ottaway, this volume) —does not and cannot work.

In the concluding contribution, Mark Duffield provides a broader under-standing of the problems and limitations of external intervention presentedin this section. For Duffield, the engagement of development and reliefagencies with increasingly intractable conflicts (violent and simmering) hasled to a radicalization of external assistance, as donor agencies (and NGOs)grow willing to countenance intervention practices that penetrate deeperand deeper into the social, political and economic fabric of recipient states.Rather than being the chaotic, barbaric and irrational contexts which aidagencies take them to be, the ‘new wars’ have been an occasion for local


actors to refashion and transform ‘the opportunities of liberal globalization. . . into new (and essentially non-liberal) forms of autonomy, protection andsocial regulation’ (Duffield, this volume). The link to state collapse is notdifficult to find: many of the redefined relationships involve ‘opting-out’ offormal or legal relations to political and economic institutions (through suchthings as parallel trade and the shadow economy), thus facilitating thecollapse of state institutions and the slide into violence. On this account,post-collapse reconstruction is unlikely to break this cycle as long as theimperatives facing local actors dictate ‘exit’ as opposed to ‘voice’ or ‘loyalty’as an appropriate strategy (Hirschman, 1970).

CONCLUSION

The issues that frame this volume are really a large agenda for research,which a collection such as this can only begin to address. Nonetheless, thecollection already makes several notable advances. Contributors carefullyexamine the phenomenon of state collapse, including historicizing this ‘otherface’ of state formation and drawing out how and why today’s internationalcontext is less conducive to the maintenance of states than it was during theCold War. They also give empirically-grounded insights into recent cases ofstate collapse, potentially emergent situations of this kind, and the con-ditions and dynamics that can lead to state collapse as well as to (at leastpartial) reconstitution. Finally, they analyse contemporary responses tostate collapse, questioning the assumptions underlying relief, conflictresolution and reconstruction efforts and, when appropriate, proposingalternative strategies. These efforts serve collectively to extend the study ofthe issue of state collapse and to open avenues for further debate andresearch.

We consider it important for such debate and research to recognize — asthis volume has sought to — that state failure and state collapse must bedistinguished from each other, and must not be subsumed under the vague,broad and ambiguous headings of political conflict or civil war. Statecollapse is different. It poses challenges both to the Whig narrative of aprogressive worldwide march to modern (usually liberal) statehood, and tothe ‘anti-statist’ vision that regards the erosion of state forms as anopportunity for new forms of political community to emerge at the local orcosmopolitan (global) level. The modern state continues to be a work inprogress, and the potential for failure or reversal remains present. Similarly,post-modern political forms of authority and legitimacy may emerge indifferent parts of the world, but these are just as likely to be dystopic ascelebratory, and they still need to answer the fundamental questions ofpolitical order that animated the emergence of the modern state in Europe.A close study of the processes that can lead to state collapse, to the dynamicinterplay of global and local forces in state collapse, and to the normative


and practical underpinnings of the international community’s efforts torecreate states after collapse, can shed light on some of these broaderreshapings of the global political order in the twenty-first century.

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Jennifer Milliken’s publications include The Social Construction of the KoreanWar: Conflict and its Possibilities, as well as articles in Millennium andEuropean Journal of International Relations. An Assistant Professor at theGraduate Institute of International Studies (132 rue de Lausanne, 1211Geneva, Switzerland), she is working on issues of patronage and stateformation, and humanitarian relief and post-conflict reconstruction.Keith Krause is Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies(Geneva) and founder and Programme Director of the Small Arms Survey.His publications include Arms and the State and (as co-editor) Critical SecurityStudies: Concepts and Cases. His research examines transnational action tocheck small arms proliferation, and state formation and insecurity in thepost-colonial world.


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